An Enhanced Key Management Scheme for LoRaWAN

Abstract

LoRaWAN appears as one of the new Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) standards in recent IoT market. The outstanding features of LPWAN are the low power consumption and long-range coverage. The LoRaWAN 1.1 specification has a basic security scheme defined. However, the scheme can be further improved in the aspect of the key management. In this paper, the overall LoRaWAN 1.1 security is reviewed and an enhanced LoRaWAN security with a root key update scheme is proposed. The root key update will make the cryptanalysis on security keys in LoRaWAN more difficult. The analysis and simulation have shown that the proposed root key update scheme has the lowest requirement on computing resources compared with other key derivation schemes including the one used in LoRaWAN session key update. The results have also shown the key generated in the proposed scheme has high randomness which is a basic requirement for a security key.